Good Friday with the "Dean" of basketball coaches

We are down to the Final Four in the college basketball tournament that is called "March Madness". This tournament alone is $ 1 billion dollar cash cow for the NCAA and their member schools. The NCAA makes tons of money, the schools make tons of money, and the coaches start collecting their bonus checks that will be added to their already million dollar salaries.

Everyone involved gets a bad rap due to the excessiveness of this entire event, some of it warrantied, but in the end it is great and undeniable entertainment. The games are close and competitive with the spotlight and commentary concentrated on the players as well as the coaches.

There is one very deserving and famous coach that will not be present this year and his presence will be sorely missed. Dean Smith, who passed away on February 7th of this year. He was 83 years old and has done more for college basketball since James Naismith.

Here are just a few of this man's accomplishments:

- Coached 36 years at the University of North Carolina
- Retired with more wins than any Division 1 coach in history
- Won two national championships (1982 & 1993)
- Coached the gold-metal winning USA basketball team in Montreal (1976)

What you read above are the media's highly publicized accomplishments of Coach Dean Smith and the following are Mad Man's acknowledgements:  

- Dean Smith recruited and gave a scholarship to the first African American to play for North  Carolina - Charlie Scott

- It was said that the only coach to stop Michael Jordan by his style of play was Coach Smith. Michael Jordan scoffs at these types of comments while stating.

" Other than my parents, no one had a bigger influence in my life than Coach Smith. He was my mentor, my teacher, my second father. Coach was always there for me whenever I needed him and I loved him for it. In teaching me the game of basketball, he taught me about life".

- Coach Smith was also noted for creating such game strategies as "the tired signal" where if a player became fatigued, he could signal the bench and take himself out of a game.

- He also created the "four corners" which was a stalling technique which forced the NCAA to implement the time clock to make teams play faster.

Coach Smith did much, much more for all of his players especially the African Americans that played for him. He graduated 96% of his players with many of them entering and succeeding in the NBA.

As his family was reading his last will and testament, it was not a surprise that Dean Smith had bequeathed $ 200 dollars each, to all 180 young men who played for him while asking them to have one more dinner on him.

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Mad Man